UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

According to Jarrar, no Palestinian official should engage in any form of dialogue with Israel, because such engagement helps to legitimize a state that is founded on genocide and ethnic cleansing; a state that is currently carrying out various types of war crimes, the very crimes that Jarrar tried to expose before the ICC.

The US-Israeli propaganda machine has not just targeted Palestinian fighters or factions, but has also done its utmost to dehumanize, and thus justify the killing of, Palestinian children too. “Children as young as eight turned into bombers, shooters, stabbers,” reported one Adam Kredo in the Washington Free Beacon, citing a “new report on child terrorists and their enablers.” This is not simply bad journalism, but part of a calculated Israeli campaign aimed at preemptively justifying the killings of children such as Nassir and Mohammed, and hundreds more like them.

It is that same ominous discourse that resulted in the call for genocide made by none other than Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, when she also called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”

According to the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions (ICAHD’s) report last December, since 1967 “nearly 50,000 Palestinian homes and structures have been demolished – displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and affecting the livelihoods of thousands of others.”Combined with the destruction of Palestinian villages upon the establishment of Israel, and the demolition of Palestinian homes inside Israel itself, ICAHD puts the total number of homes destroyed since 1948 at more than 100,000.In fact, as the group itself acknowledges, the figure above is quite conservative. Indeed, it is. In Gaza alone, and in the last 10 years which witnessed three major Israeli wars, nearly 50,000 homes and structures were reportedly destroyed.

… This is not just a question of Khan Al-Ahmar. It is a question of the very survival of the Palestinian people, threatened by a racist state that has been allowed to “go wild” for 70 years, untamed and without repercussions.

Seventy years of Israeli Jewish supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars, sieges, mass incarceration, numerous discriminatory laws, all aimed at the very destruction of the Palestinian people should have provided sufficient clues that Israel was never a democracy, to begin with.

However, the Jewish Nation-state Law is the last nail in the coffin — those who insist on supporting Israel must know that they are supporting an unabashed Apartheid regime.

Seventy years of Israeli Jewish supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars, sieges, mass incarceration and numerous discriminatory laws — all aimed at the very destruction of the Palestinian people — should have given enough clues that Israel was never a democracy to begin with. The Jewish Nation-State Law is merely the icing on the cake.

Albert Einstein, along with other Jewish luminaries, including Hannah Arendt, had a letter published in The New York Times on December 4, 1948. That was only a few months after Israel had declared its independence and as hundreds of Palestinian villages were being demolished after their inhabitants were expelled. The letter denounced Israel’s newly founded Herut party and its young leader, Menachem Begin… In the letter, Einstein and his co-signatories described Herut (“Freedom”) as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and fascist parties.”

… On April 19, Israel celebrated its independence day. The “Nazi and fascist” mentality that defined Herut in 1948 now defines the most powerful ruling class in Israel. Israel’s leaders speak openly of genocide and murder, yet they celebrate and promote Israel as if it was an icon of civilization, democracy and human rights.

Undeniably, the views of Ariel, Bennett and Caspit are not angry statements uttered in a moment of rage. They are all reflections of real policies that have been carried out for over 70 years. Indeed, killing, raping and imprisoning for life are features that have accompanied the state of Israel since the very beginning.

This violent legacy continues to define Israel to this day, through the use of what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes as “incremental genocide”.

Throughout this long legacy, little has changed except for names and titles. The Zionist militias that orchestrated the genocide of the Palestinians prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948 merged together to form the Israeli army; and the leaders of these groups became Israel’s leaders.

Founded upon the racist Zionism ideology, Israel has claimed Palestine as a home to world Jewry, while systematically destroying and imprisoning the Palestinian nation. This process is identified by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, as the ‘incremental genocide’ of the Palestinians, which has never ceased since 1947-1948.

If Palestinians actually “existed” in Israel’s imagination, there can never be any moral justification for its creation; there will never be any Israeli narrative that could be powerful enough to rejoice at the birth of the Israeli “miracle” that “made the desert bloom”. That blood-stained birth callously required the destruction of an entire nation; people with a unique history, language, culture and collective memory. It was thus absolutely necessary for the Palestinians to be wiped out to quell any possible sense of Israeli guilt, shame and legal and moral responsibility for what has befallen millions of dispossessed people.

… Terms such as the “Jewish Nakba” are becoming omnipresent, in reference to the alleged ethnic cleansing of Arab Jews from their countries during the war of 1948. While the attempt to rewrite history is disingenuous at best, it signals the growing signs of defeat for the Israeli discourse. The term “Nakba” has proven to be too powerful a reference to the origins of Israel, established with genocidal intent and complete disregard for another nation.

Nevertheless, the Nakba must be in a constant process of re-evaluation and, if needed, redefinition. The Nakba is not merely a question of history, but an ongoing reality that has affected several generations of Palestinians.

Yoav Litvin, for example, argues in TeleSur that the “precedent set by this case will further solidify the complete dehumanization of Palestinians and pave the way for further ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
In an article, entitled “Like Brexit and Trump, Azaria verdict exposes a moment of transition in Israel,” Jonathan Cook eluded to a similar idea: “The soldier’s trial, far from proof of the rule of law, was the last gasp of a dying order.” Neither Litvin nor Cook are suggesting that the supposed change in Israel is substantive, but an important change nonetheless. However, if the past and the present are one and the same, where is the “transition“? …In other words there is nothing new here, since the mainstreaming of genocide in Israel took place before and during the founding of the country, and ever since. Fortunately, some Israeli leaders were quite candid about the crimes of that era.